This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

I wrote recently about how my concerns about (generative AI) are probably more about the broader Ellulian system of technique than the specifics of the technology. Here’s a passage from this article that makes a similar point better:

For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.

The depressing thing is that this isn’t that far off from how OpenAI and Anthropic think.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

What a depressing story.

This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

Look, it shouldn’t take this story for people to realize that OpenAI exploits others’ contributions to make its products, but if it does the trick, I’ll take it. (And this is admittedly creepier than its base-level exploitation.)

Last paragraph here is an important one: I’ve seen a lot of headlines about OpenAI calling for regulation, but it’s noteworthy that it’s hypothetical future regulation.